Standard Usage of Application Areas

An Application Area is designed to contain a single business application that you want to validate, release, and maintain as a unit. For example, an Application Area's business purpose might be to manage a single study, including all the programs for transforming and reporting data in that study. Or an Application Area might be used to generate a set of projectwide reports, or to merge data for all studies in a project. An Application Area supports a business application in two ways:

• Library. An Application Area library contains the object definitions—Tables, Load Sets, Programs, Workflows, Report Sets, Data Marts, Business Areas and their component parts—created (or copied and modified) specifically to accomplish the business purpose of the Application Area. When you create a new object in a Work Area, Oracle LSH automatically creates the new object definition in the library of the owning Application Area. You can validate these definitions and move them to the Domain library if that is your policy. As in a Domain, the library is not a separate container but a collection of object definitions stored directly in the Application Area.
• Work Area Container. An Application Area contains all the Work Areas necessary to develop, test, and put into production all the object instances necessary to accomplish the business purpose of the Application Area over time. A Work Area may contain instances of object definitions that are stored in any Domain or Application Area library.

For further information on Work Areas, see Using Work Areas.